Book Review: As for Me and My House by Rose Marie Whiteside

As education continues to become an issue in the schools, as scores continue to drop, students are leaving schools at alarming rates. Those that struggle with learning and fitting in find it easier to drop out, and scores for the students that continue are not correspondingly high.

Rose Marie Whiteside has written a guide for parents with school age children using facts and statistics to help them help their children through the education process. Her own education is in political science and English literature, with her graduate work in the field of special education. Her most recent degree was in social work.

She has spent much of her time working towards better education and has several websites dedicated to her work. In As for Me and My House, she has put together a guide for the parent who wants to take control of their child’s education. It is interspersed with religion, politics and statistics, utilizing the learning and proven theories and facts acquired over the years.

She sets about building an argument on how education has become more difficult as parents become immersed in their work, and leave all the control to the school system. Her guidance and statistics show the differing roadblocks to education helping to create the problem with more students dropping out. These include social standing, lifestyle, economics, and realities to name a few. Whiteside is well versed in the grant programs and the efficiency of the government programs and yet she feels it is not enough. Every child is entitled to an education, and it seems the lengths the government uses to insure this right are often beyond logic.

In this guide, Ms. Whiteside urges the parent to take a stand and become involved in all areas of education for their child, to become a partner with the teacher. Knowledge is power, and knowing what and how their child is learning will help them to ease the way through the process.

In her view, education is more than just learning schoolwork; it involves anger management, differing ways of studying, mentoring and due diligence. As education erodes, the prospects for a healthy economy also takes a down turn. This guide is about taking care of your own house and building it strong and healthy, one block at a time.

This would be a good book for the family looking for guidance to become involved in their students studies and long-term learning. It is thought provoking and knowledgeable, and Whiteside uses her education as a springboard to help solve the issues she sees inherent in our school systems today.

While much of her rhetoric is fact based, there is always opinion, and with any controversial subject, you must often try to sort through the differences. Rose Marie Whiteside has tried to keep this as fact based as possible, and for those looking for such guidance this will be a great boon. This guide is full of information and guidance, with an eye to the everyday issues faced by our children as they work on their education.